Submitted by Sam…
I have always seen myself as different from other people. Pride told me that everyone else were objects standing before me that could either satisfy my desires or oppose them. But God introduced another standard into my life from an early age – my friend Justin, a servant of Christ, painted a picture of God’s love through his friendship with me. This created a battle within me as I became obsessed with love and sought it everywhere I could. The examples society provided readily for me in the media told me to look for a romantic relationship and loyal friendships, but at the same time I could find neither of these in my life. When I viewed everyone through a lens of pride there would be no relationship if I was not lord and they lesser. In high school this was difficult to maintain, with so many people exceeding my academic, physical, and social performance. Even being in the highest circle among the academic body of the school, I found myself picking out those above me and judging them my inferiors physically. Anyone on a sports team was automatically dumber than I.
My failure to make friends in any way led me to turn to anime and video games to escape from the reality of my loveless life. In the high school anime club I found another world to escape into premade for me as well as a group of like-minded companions. Video games provided worlds into which I could not only escape, but even excel and become the perfect lord that my pride deemed me. These things drained away all of my time and money, entrenching themselves into my life and filling my heart with messages of lust and hatred, but I accepted them without even a hint of discontent. I was, after all, “enjoying myself.”
At this same time lust managed to take a firm grasp on my heart and mind through my seeking a romantic relationship in the way that society instructed me. It’s no surprise that having found no satisfaction in seeking empty relationships that my lust expanded into the realm of pornography. At first it would be only looking at the magazines that came in the mail, but by the time I left for college it was unrestricted internet pornography. This became so strong a grip on my life that it sometimes vied with gaming for control of the majority of my time and became the subject of a self-powered campaign of extermination, which failed repeatedly.
When I came to college I wanted nothing other than to start over. I was moving all the way to California and was leaving behind my whole past. Everything seemed well off at first, I even managed to mostly stop gaming and even made friends, but time told another story. Still gripped by pride, pornography, and knowing only anime to escape to for comfort, it was difficult to maintain the “good new life” I wanted. A fateful meeting at this time led me to start coming out to Koinonia Bible studies and the newly inaugurated Gracepoint Fellowship Church. In the church I saw again the loving relationships I had experienced in my friendship with Justin. This is what I was looking for, obsessing over, failing to attain for myself. I kept coming out and in the spring I was able to take Course 101. Through Course I learned more about God and the true nature of sin as not actions founded in evil, but as an active rejection of God. I had always seen my life as full of sin before as I did evil, but this made it clear the extent of sin in my life. Through pride I was rejecting God’s lordship and placing myself on the throne. All of my relationships were strained and tended to fail because I was always trying to control everything and everyone in my life. How could I experience love if I couldn’t even humble myself enough to love others as their own entities? Suddenly the sin I had grudgingly acknowledged really stuck to me.
As the semester came to a close I tried to deal with these problems and open up to Christ. The main problem was that it was in that order. I was dealing with sin on my own and failing, then not going to Christ humbly but wondering why He wasn’t helping. Even though I knew it was sinful I continued to turn to pornography, then I would become angry at my own failure and feel as though I was even further from God and where I wanted to be. At this point games and anime weren’t even on my mind as bad things, which further hindered any efforts I made to combat sin – not only draining my time, but also serving as a medium for lust to enter into my life and an artificial escape from my problems.
Over the summer while I was at home in Baltimore, I joined Justin and some members of his fellowship group for a series of weekly Bible studies that would change the way I dealt with my sin. With Course 101 behind me, my knowledge of the basic concepts of Christianity was, at least at surface level, pretty solid. During Bible study I found myself opening up to the people there and really trying to take in the value of the Word as we went over some foundational Bible passages, such as the story of the prodigal son. Looking into that story I found myself in the shoes of the son who had taken everything for himself and thrown it all away. Now, like him, I could only return to my Father as a servant, really swallowing my pride on my return. But I was still unwilling to give up the control I’d had on my life for so long, making any real return to my Father impossible. I had to give up all control to Him, humbling myself and throwing off the pride that was controlling me. Opening up the issues of lust and pride that were cooped up behind the barriers in my heart, even if only a little at first, to Justin and the others really helped me take the first step in swallowing my own pride and relinquishing control over my life to Christ.
Into sophomore year I could see more and more my need for salvation from my sins as I could do nothing to change the truth of my sinfulness. Yet I could still not accept the lordship of Christ in my life. Despite the reality of my sinfulness, I still wanted to be perfect. I was gripped to pursue worthless things like anime and games as well as my own lust for pornography. I made excuses to maintain control and keep these things in my life, but as I reflected on my own life it was ever clear that a real change needed to occur if there was to be any improvement. Lust and games and all the promises made by society that they would provide real and lasting pleasure and enjoyment in life had quite simply failed. It was clear that nothing and no one but God could bring anything good in my life, but I knew nothing other than the pleasure-seeking I had been taught and practiced from birth. Throughout this battle between a promise for something new but somehow out of reach and the dissatisfaction I had with my own life I fell in and out of depression. But God knew my struggles, and He continued to speak to me through the messages I heard and in speaking to John. I realized that Jesus’ death on the cross gave me what I had ever been trying to find – the love of my Heavenly Father. It cleaned me that I might be able to go before Him and enter into His love. What He did I could not do in my present state – God humbled Himself so much that He sent His own Son to die upon the cross for me. That was His love. That’s what I so desired. Even in all my pride I could do naught by the same, to humble myself and die to all that I was, all that I loved, all that I held on to, that I might find the one thing I wanted most. That night God sent my leader John to talk with me about my spiritual progress and I was able to commit myself then, accepting Christ as my personal Lord and Savior.
Giving Him control over my life broke the pride that I had before so feverishly maintained, freeing me from my own need for perfection and enabling me to bring all of my sin to the table before Him to be dealt with. God’s love filled me and enabled me to really connect with other people as I no longer judged them but instead shared in their sufferings as they shared in mine. Together we were all victims of our own sinful nature and now I could open up and share my life with all of God’s children, my brothers and sisters.
But I thought that just having God with me would lead to change for the better in my life. Indeed, God was there with me in those first few days as He is now. The very day after I accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior a study Bible arrived in the mail from Justin – now a brother in Christ. Though slow at first, I could now bring all of my sin and burdens before Him. I found myself struggling with a lack of conviction to change the way I was really living, expecting to be able to be free of my sin without any real action on my part. After all, there were things that I had still wanted to lord over in my life, such as anime and games, there were still entrenched in my heart and mind. While my comfort was supposed to come from my salvation by God’s grace, it was still practically coming from the same places it always had, and I continued to be sucked into the world of anime. But Pastor Ed continually told us to own our lives, taking responsibility for all our actions. This meant change. I had been “me” and had taken responsibility for all of my actions, but I was really just taking responsibility only when I wanted it, avoiding all my other responsibilities and escaping into anime and games. But when I stepped forward over the summer to really share God’s love with others it was made clear that there was a part of me missing, stuck in the worlds of anime and games that I was escaping into.
Reconciling this part of myself to Christ has been painful, changing my own conceptions of comfort to be the comfort of knowing that God is with me and the joy that comes in serving Him and being able to do His work despite my sinful nature. Being called to reach out more, I was able to do so over the summer. Serving as an ambassador for Christ really brought me to grips with all the sin still running rampant in my life thanks to the hindrances of games and anime. I was able to throw off these hindrances as I filled my time with doing God’s work and building myself up in His Word. In addition to just spending time getting to know people through outreach, I was able to find a place in the College Ops photoshop team as well as busy myself helping out as much as I could with events like NSWN for the Berkeley campus. During the semester I have been really blessed by the junior discipleship that I have been a part of as I build up peer brother relationships that support me and help keep me accountable. My outreach to younger brothers has been able to take new forms – leading DT (which I was never even good with keeping up before), cooking and hosting dinners, dorm outreach, and even sharing my testimony at the GONE event. I’ve been blessed by all the things that God has given me in my life that I never would have even imagined finding joy in before and now even in bad times I find encouragement and strength in Christ. Indeed I live now for a higher purpose than I ever could have imagined when I first sought out love in my life. So let me declare the praises of him who called me out of darkness into His wonderful light!
